At E3 2009, I had a chance to sit again in those crapped rooms and checked out how Bayonetta was coming along. In the new demo, Bayonetta was still hack and slashing her way through crowds of angelic enemies. I know it sounds like any other beat-’em up, but that’s like saying Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is just like any other first-person shooter with a shotgun.

What separates Bayonetta from its peers is in its gameplay and clever level design. Kamiya seems to have more fun with perspective in this demo. Sure, Bayonetta is doing her slaying with her high-heel boot guns and sword. But she’s also killing these enemies while strutting across walls during a volcanic eruption with lava gushing down the main roadway.

It’s a little disorienting at first. The world looks like it’s turned upside-down, but that’s just Bayonetta using her witch powers to stick to the walls as if it were flat ground. As she made her way across the level, I noticed that she had a triple jump and a move called Witch Time, which slows the world down. It activates when Bayonetta successfully performs an evasion move, and there’s no limit on how many times you can use it.

Those are some nifty moves, but a Kamiya game wouldn’t be right, if there wasn’t some flair to the combat and Bayonetta has this in spades. She can use her magic to transform her hair into different objects. At one point, she grabbed a spiked wheel and used it to grind an enemy into mincemeat. Everything she does is smooth and quick with a heavy touch of nonchalance.

But there are other touches such as the pink butterflies that appear and evaporate as she jumps and the Charlie’s Angels-like soundtrack that gives her a girlier edge when compared to Kamiya’s other heroes.

One last note on perspective: Toward the end of the demo, players have to fight a dragon. The monster’s head bursts through a building’s stain-glass window and Bayonetta has to fight the beast’s head. At first, I thought it was your garden-variety big boss fight where you see part of its form. But again, Kamiya plays with the perspective a little, and during the battle, the camera pans out, and I saw that the dragon actually ripped part of the building out.

The dragon was carrying Bayonetta and the room with it through the air. It’s just another way that the game plays with perspective, twisting things around and surprising players just a little bit. In the end, Bayonetta defeated the dragon with something like 1,000 Gigaton hit. That move almost works like a quicktime event (and yes there are some in this game) and the number of Gigatons act as bonus point and provides extra damage during finishing moves.

If all goes well, Bayonetta will come to the States in September. It will offer about 12 hours of gameplay with a range of difficulty levels. It sounds as if the game will be easier for novices. During the demo session, Kamiya did say that he wanted to create a game that his mother could enjoy.